Tim Morrissey > Recent Status Updates

In desperate need of an editor holy hell. “Grasson” Hall 😂. How did he get the name of BC’s most famous building wrong three times? Google exists.

A minefield of conceits and pretensions that attempts to pass near class-blind literary criticism off as social scientific theorizing. It pushes Ignatiev’s mythology of a unique social drive to whiteness amongst Irish Americans that seemingly does not exist within Ireland, a flimsy and self-interested belief with a shallow encounter with the modern Irish news.

So far very skeptical of yet another Irish reading of Irish America that believes in ethnic fade theory and attempts to lump Scotch Irish and Irish American into one ethnic category, even though the divisions between the two are larger than say Irish America and Italian America. I’m only a few chapters in, but I don’t think Burke has ever spoken to Irish Americans in real life.

Each of these essays comes close to understanding Irish America as what it actually is, an ethnic sub culture in the US and not a bastion of Irish culture, but ultimately is subsumed by a general european cultural hegemony that views any deviation from the course of the home nation as inauthentic or a betrayal. As a young, queer, Irish American, this is a very frustrating book to read.

There are some deep issues with this book, most notably that it attempts to read Irish America from an Irish perspective, and not from an Irish American perspective, and in doing so, makes the oh so common Irish mistake of seeing Irish America as a monolith from which Irish people need to distance themselves, and cannot fathom that Ireland, both south and north, are themselves member states of the western empire.